I wrote the following piece for IFP’s Transit Abundance Playbook , a collection of 15 ideas to improve transit delivery in the US. American transit costs and timelines are substantially higher than those of other developed countries: Spain builds tunneled subway for ~$200 million per mile, while New York spends billions; China built an entire network of high-speed rail while California was failing to connect Bakersfield to Merced. This playbook draws on the past decade of research into the ca...

Content warning: This poem is about the ongoing heat in Europe. I strike an optimistic tone toward the end, but if you would prefer not to read about the heat, I offer you one of the Scottish poems I have written in stead . Nature’s weary tears fill the air; invisible, warming. Relentlessly, days proceed. Hours pass; Celsius rises. Midnights: warm like day. We stay inside. Blinds closed, water glasses full, cookers off. Flowers bloom early. Eyelids weigh; we yearn for rest that does not come....

I've been following WisdPi's development of various 5 Gbps and 10 Gbps Ethernet adapters for the past couple years. They use newer Realtek Ethernet chips, which sometimes have performance quirks—most frequently encountered under Linux. In today's video, I tested the new WisdPi 10G Ethernet Expansion Card for Framework computers. It fits in any available Framework Expansion slot—even on the Framework Desktop. But Expansion Cards use USB-C for their connection to the mainboard—an...

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-55200 for the project libssh2 , site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix an out-of-bounds write in ssh2_transport_read() due to a missing upper bound check on the packet_length field, resulting in heap corruption and potential remote code execution. This is due to the affected components being written in C, the only programming language where these vuln...

Create one of those Uses pages. Still a work in progress, but there's a good chunk of the stuff I use on there now. https://kevquirk.com/uses Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment . Create one of those Uses pages. Still a work in progress, but there's a good chunk of the stuff I us...

What happens if I just point a git server at an object storage bucket? Back when I was porting agent sandboxes to Go , I built everything on top of billy , a filesystem abstraction for Go. The whole trick of the project was teaching a Tigris bucket to act enough like a filesystem that a shell interpreter and its tools couldn’t tell the difference. Billy was the key layer that made the entire façade fall into place. ...

I’m hosting July’s IWBC and the timing is perfect since I split my reading year into to halves, which means I’m starting with an empty shelf in July. The book I picked is “To Have or to Be” by Erich Fromm . I read this book now more than 20 years ago, and I remember having a great impact on young me. And so I started wondering what current me would think of it. And the IWBC is a good excuse to pick it up a second time. If you decide to read it and post a review on your blog, m...

Watching the development of AI harnesses is really interesting for a ton of reasons. It is ground zero for agentic development, a large amount of the work is open source, and every major player thinks that they are in a winner takes all race so the enginering teams are large and incredibly talented. Claude Code alone will probably be processing $100bn a month in tokens in the next year so every single choice has large consequences, if they aren't executing better than everyone else they will qui...

What links certain mathematical models of traffic flow, shallow-water waves, and quantum particle scattering? The surprising answer lies in a corner of the algebraic combinatorics world that goes by the name of positive Grassmannian. In simple terms, the positive Grassmannian is a shape that classifies other shapes. Remarkably, pieces of the positive Grassmannian can be reassembled in forms that… Source What links certain mathematical models of traffic flow, shallow-water waves, and quantum...

While I decide what to do with PEP 832 after polling folks on their opinion , I thought I would write out why I'm even bothering with any of this. I'm going to talk from the perspective of VS Code and its Python extensions , but you could just as easily substitute "VS Code" for your editor of choice or even "AI agent" and it wouldn't change the problem: it isn't necessarily easy for tools like VS Code to know what workflow (tool) you're using and thus where you're putting your (virtual) env...

When you start thinking deeply about a mathematics problem you may enter the "zone", a period of intense focus where you think solely about the problem and potential solutions, and more importantly block out all other thoughts and even lose track of time. Mathematicians don't own the zone, actors, musicians, athletes and many others have their own version of the zone. But for math, when working on an open problem, you have no idea how difficult a solution may be, or if a solution exists at all. ...

Exploring how compilers lower ordinary loops into explicit data-parallel kernels. Exploring how compilers lower ordinary loops into explicit data-parallel kernels.

By Zhuoning Yuan , Ta-Ying Cheng , Benjamin Klein , Bahareh Azarnoush Introduction At Netflix, we build technology to help storytellers bring their creative visions to life and to help members discover the stories they love. To connect stories with diverse audiences around the world, we produce promotional assets, including trailers, teasers, and social short‑form videos, that build on and elevate the original footage. Through close collaboration with the teams crafting these assets, we i...

This morning on Hacker News I saw Moebius: 0.2B Lightweight Image Inpainting Framework with 10B-Level Performance , describing a small but effective inpainting model - a model where you can mark regions of an image to remove and the model imagines what should fill the space. The released model required PyTorch and NVIDIA CUDA , but since it described itself as 0.2B I decided to try and get it running using WebGPU in a browser. TL;DR: I got it working, and you can try the demo at simonw.gith...

Legibility of Effort LLMs have broken legibility of effort - our ability to tell, at a glance, whether something took a human real work. What happens next? Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/legibility-of-effort Legibility of Effort LLMs have broken legibility of effort - our ability to tell, at a glance, whether something took a human real work. What happens next? Read the full post on my blog! Here's a raw link, if...

When I was a kid, most people did not know how to type. We took typing class. The final exam was a speed test: words per minute. Today, you will not impress anyone by saying you can type. In fact, cursive writing is fading. Kids increasingly cannot read or write it. We type constantly. We forget how many skills are learned, and how often some of these skills have faded. But not everything fades. Socrates would be immensely popular today as a teacher. I still buy and recommend paper books. Is...

Bridging Two Worlds of Entertainment Contemporary social gaming platforms are redefining the player experience by merging sports betting with slot machine gameplay into a unified, fluid environment. This fusion caters to a broad spectrum of player preferences, from quick, casual interactions to extended sessions of exploration. By streamlining core mechanics and emphasizing accessibility, these platforms lower the entry barrier for newcomers while maintaining enough depth to eng...

I have to publish this now, we’re already halfway through W26. Current situation: JUST KIDDING I am actually inside staring at a computer instead of lying on my back in a meadow staring up at the sky. But I did see these nice clouds earlier today.  Monday 08 June: The U of Ark college visit. Zeke really likes it and they have a great engineering program. It poured down rain all morning. I bought umbrellas in the gift shop. I am bad at selfies.  ...

I have a new graphics card for my primary desktop, the Sapphire Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT . This replaces my Zotac GeForce RTX 3070 Twin Edge , a card with a name that’s almost as long. The tl;dr is: it’s great, for me! This isn’t going to be a technical post laden with benchmarks; there are plenty of more qualified people you can read and watch for those. Instead, this is more of a thinking-out-loud post about the upgrade process, and how one random person with their own specif...

WARSAW (June 23, 2026) — Shield AI, the defense-tech company building the world’s best AI pilots and next-generation aircraft, today announced that Poland’s Armament Agency has signed a contract for the acquisition of  V-BAT  vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) intended to support Polish Navy operations.   The V-BAT force will be deployed aboard a Polish Navy vessel, providing maritime domain awareness and intelligence, surveillance, and re...

I don’t prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops. — Boris Cherny Over the last months I have watched more and more people build something on top of coding agents that feels meaningfully different from just using a coding agent. Some of this happens on top of Pi which is cool to see for sure! The pattern is the same everywhere though: work is put into a queue of sorts, a machine picks it up, attempts it, sto...

About 3 weeks ago, Leo Laporte and I recorded the first episode of what will be a new monthly show on the TWiT network . Naming things is hard, and we almost voted on the name, like we did for Stack Overflow , but we quickly landed on Off By One with Jeff Atwood – which is funny for so many reasons, but mainly because of this programmer joke: No, I did not come up with this variation on the classic quote , but I wish I had. Well, whatever, here's show number two – free to view for eve...

There’s a new paper out called “PivCo-Huffman” (HTML version with annotations here ) and it’s very interesting. Normal Huffman decoding (and, to a lesser extent, encoding) is inherently quite serial. We can get explicit parallelism by using multiple streams , which scales just fine to moderate numbers of streams – something like 4-8 is usually not an issue. Not very suitable for vectorization or wide vector machines like GPUs, though: every extra stream adds signaling overhead in t...